A gang of thieves in Poland has stolen the infamous wrought iron sign announcing that work sets you free that spans the main gate of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

The long, curving sign, reading Arbeit macht frei, was erected by the Nazis soon after the old Auschwitz barracks were converted into a labour and extermination centre in 1940. It was supposed to suggest that hard work would eventually allow inmates to walk free.

But, as Auschwitz was turned into a major hub for the Holocaust, murdering over a million people, the majority of them Jews, the sign became a mocking, cynical commentary.

It seems that a gang of perhaps three people unscrewed the sign between three oclock and five oclock on Friday morning, said the spokesman for the police in southern Poland, Dariusz Nowak. They must have used a ladder and had a car waiting for them.

I confess I didn’t know the true meaning of the phrase on the sign. I kew the literal stranslation, but thought it was not a promise of eventual freedom, but an insult to the Jews imprisoned there. In the sense of, you will work, instead of engage inusury or whatever other imagined sin.

No! Not idiots.
Probably a couple of “reformed communists”, believing that this is what free enterprise is.
..and why wouldn’t they? The figurehead of the United States Hussein Mmm Mmm Mmm would agree with them.

That comes from the era of serfdom in Germany. If a serf could live for a year in one of the free cities, he was no longer bound to his lord. Of course, he had to do some kind of paid labor to survive in a city for a year, so “Work makes you free.” The same idea is found in “City air makes a free man.”

19
posted on 12/18/2009 8:26:53 PM PST
by VanShuyten
("a shadow...draped nobly in the folds of a gorgeous eloquence.")

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